Hi all!
In March we made three releases, Tor Browser 6.5.1[1], 7.0a2[2], and 7.0a2-hardened[3].
Tor Browser 6.5.1 was the first point release in the 6.5 series fixing mainly regressions we found after 6.5 got out and containing version bumps to a variety of our components to close security holes. We needed to put some effort into creating a new patch for our W^X JIT implementation as the backported patch we used got broken by a security fix.
The alpha and the hardened releases shipped tor 0.3.0.4-rc but included otherwise nearly the same changes as the stable one.
Besides work related to our releases we focused mainly on making our build system faster and more scalable[4], and on moving to Firefox ESR 52[6]. We organized our tickets in a way that blockers for our switch to ESR 52 in our nightly builds were easily visible by using the keyword `tbb-7.0-must-nightly`. We solved all of them and are about to start nightly builds with a browser based on ESR 52. Bundles should be available from tomorrow on.[6] We made further progress on our build system improvements as well and nightly builds using rbm, our new reproducible builds manager, should be available this month, too.[7]
The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in March is accessible using the TorBrowserTeam201703 tag in our bug tracker[8].
In April we plan to get a set of new releases out (6.5.2, 7.0a3, and 7.0a3-hardened) and focus on getting the alpha series into a stable shape. We have created special keywords to track both the work needed for the alpha and the work to get it stablilized while retaining all the properties outlined in our design documentation. Those keywords are: `tbb-7.0-must-alpha` and `tbb-7.0-must`. If there is time left we plan to work further on making our build system faster and more scalable. We intend to set up regular nightly builds which would allow us to quantify the build time improvements we expect from the new build infrastructure.[9]
All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the TorBrowserTeam201704 tag in our bug tracker.[10]
Georg
[1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-651-released [2] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-70a2-released [3] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-70a2-hardened-released [4] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17379 [5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~ff52-esr [6] https://people.torproject.org/~linus/builds/ [7] See https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17379 and child tickets [8] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~T... [9] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21286 [10] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~TorBrowserTeam20170...